The Why Don't YouTube? Catchup - November 18th-24th 2024

From the house of @whydontyoutube

November 18th

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: your latest classic book adaptation is The Prisoner Of Zenda, giving stage star Malcolm Sinclair a dual role as the soon to be crowned king of Ruritania and his English relative pressed into replacement service, with John Woodvine searching for the kidnapped monarch and Jonathon Morris trying to do away with his double.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: we mentioned Virtually Impossible last week as it was intended as Tim Child, Broadsword and Children's ITV's parallel for a younger audience to Knightmare, being set in a computer generated world inhabited by a child contestant interacting with human characters between potentially “life”-damaging mini-games whilst advised by his friends from back at base. However the action is driven by video game interfaces that looked worse than its predecessor's VR rather than walkthroughs and a horrible looking purple CGI fish takes Treguard's role, which may explain why it lasted just the one series. That and not being Knightmare, obviously.

- we actually missed this on the day itself, and our notes had it down as happening in December, but this was the true anniversary of the Catchphrase, er, event. How does that activity (not that one, the given one) represent “charmer” anyway?

- the Scottish High Court allowed cameras to record a criminal trial in Britain for the first time, the result becoming BBC2 series The Trial, beginning with a murder case placed with background in context. Despite a warm reception the, er, trial run didn't go beyond six programmes/cases.

- Brian Clough was by now deep into his cups - of strong alcoholic drink, that is - and had just released an autobiography that among other things included unwise at best and later rowed back on comments about Hillsborough victims but still fancied himself as a combative chat show guest, which is how he came to cross combative fire on Clive Anderson Talks Back.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Band Aid 20 version of Do They Know It's Christmas? is practically forgotten now - it's Bohemian Rhapsody compared to Band Aid 30, admittedly - but the pull was still strong enough that despite going out at 5.55pm the video premiere with Madonna introduction could garner an audience of 13.5 million, albeit most would be pressganged into it as it was simulcast across all five terrestrial channels and more than twenty others on satellite and cable.

ALSO... hauntology on Pipkins! Today in 1976 Hartley Hare brings home a glove puppet that's even more disturbing than his mangy self and annoys everyone else with it only for it to gain what he believes are magical powers overnight.

November 19th

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: Susie Dent is born. After it turned out it was part of her Oxford University Press contract as a compiler of dictionaries, she made her debut in Dictionary Corner in 1992.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Queen had Bohemian Rhapsody. Radiohead had Paranoid Android. Richard Stilgoe had Statutory Right Of Entry To Your Home. The full version will show up one day, surely - paging BBC Archive! - but for now watch from 48 seconds in (and ignore the wrong caption, there was no Nationwide that night) and then buy the single.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Billy Connolly - for kids! He and Ralph McTell were old folk circuit friends and McTell wrote and recorded songs for the World Tour series, which only barely makes his lively banjo and hosepipe assisted appearance as Tickle On The Tum dustman Bobby Binns more explicable.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the very first National Lottery draw, taken for the occasion by Noel Edmonds and a large truck, watched by the year's second highest audience 20.17 million, drawmaster John Willan in place from the start. The millionaire claims were immediately undermined when seven people shared £839,254 apiece, far more winners of the lesser rewards than anticipated having cut the top prize fund. The BBC trailer kept things in perspective.

- who invented cringe comedy? A couple of Generation Game contestants, seemingly. Once the introductions are done the games involve American football drills, origami, recreating Rodin's The Kiss, recognising silhouettes and for the final game a crash course in impressions from Allan Stewart which goes much as any crash course in second hand impressions would, especially when he does Les Dennis doing Mavis Riley and gets the words the wrong way round.

- Mel & Sue finding their metier, let's say, handling late night links on Channel 4's Late Licence. Plenty of ads and trailers if you'd prefer.

ALSO... BBC2 magazine Black Britain profiles twelve year old karting sensation Lewis Hamilton today in 1997.

November 20th

60 YEARS AGO TODAY: the Rolling Stones at very close quarters to the Ready Steady Go! audience, Mick giving it plenty of attitude to the camera.

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Angela Davis talks to David Frost about the Marin County courtroom takeover and her civil rights passion on The Frost Interview.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: Christopher Biggins heads to the TVS jungle in On Safari with visitors Johnny Ball, who you'd think would be better at working out physics related challenges on the hoof, and Wincey Willis. So goody, apparently.

- The Fall had developed an unlikely working partnership with Michael Clark's avant-garde dance troupe, company taking Lay Of The Land onto Whistle Test. Andy Kershaw introducing it sporting a Marc Riley & the Creepers T-shirt adds another layer for those that know their Mark E Smith lore.

- Michael Apted calls back in for the fourth time for 28 Up, the one after which Roger Ebert named the whole Up series among his ten greatest films of all time despite the whole "not being a film" drawback. It's also the first one Charles refused to take part in, leading to an almighty row with Apted that eventually led to him trying to sue Granada for featuring his image in archive clips, augmented by the fact he actually became a documentary maker.

ALSO... Thames hadn't even been back off the picket line for a month when BBC engineers went on strike, which today in 1979 meant Nationwide in sound only.

Grandstand showed "a pretty meaningful situation", highlights of the World Series baseball, today in 1982, once Des Lynam had found out what it was.

November 21st

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: The Complete Victor Borge showcased the comedy pianist's one man show with Ronnie Hazlehurst's finest backing him up and this week an appearance by arranger, former Play School sideman and drama classical pianist for hire Tom McCall.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: the most normal thing about Chish 'n' Fips is its title, centring as it does on the lives of an odd couple garden gnomes, played by actual serious actors Tony Aitken (also the balladeer at the end of Blackadder II) and Citizen Smith's Mike Grady. In this episode they have to cope with a robot, a football and a recalcitrant tortoise.

- the opening episode of one of the greats of both children's drama and countdown to Christmas fare, The Box Of Delights, based on the John Masefield novel and the life's dream of producer Paul Stone who took ten years to obtain the rights and get the go-ahead, which he later felt was lucky as it meant visual effects technology, especially CSO and Quantel, had been allowed to develop and do the requirements justice, and indeed off the back of it he was later offered (and turned down) the production chair on Doctor Who. Apologies that it appears to have been recorded on a slope, but it’s newly out on Blu-Ray and on iPlayer from December 6th.

- Hilda Ogden finds out her husband of more than forty years Stan has died. In fact he hadn't appeared since March due to Bernard Youens suffering a series of health deteriorations and dying on 27th August

- Oxbridge Blues was a series of otherwise unconnected single plays by Oscar-winning screenwriter Frederic Raphael. The eponymous first, shown a week earlier and concerning two rival brothers in the writing business starring Ian Charleson, Amanda Redman and Michael Elphick, was BAFTA nominated. The second, That Was Tory, features married couple and wine merchants - that bit becomes important - John Bird and Joanna Lumley who find a newly separated friend, Carol Royle later of Heartbeat, coming between them.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: the call for "Ab Fab, but real" must have sounded like the call to prayer for production companies for the previous year and so Cutting Edge responded by heading behind the scenes of Marie Claire magazine. It looks something like the kind of character assassination by suggestion on editor Glenda Bailey that sticks rigidly to them for ever more; in fact she remained there until 2001, then spent nineteen years at Harper's Bazaar and retired shortly after becoming a Dame.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: somewhat prematurely but also hoist by time and fashion's twin petards, The South Bank Show profiles The Darkness.

November 22nd

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: as part of Ken Dodd's World of Laughter, The Young Generation take it to the streets.

- only two and a half months after the pilot, the first series of Rising Damp gets underway with an episode that goes straight in on there being a black cast member, although in a way that exposes Rigsby's gullibility about Philip's supposed origins.

- it does sometimes feel like these prime Miss World years were entirely put on for the benefit of ITV viewers weaned on shiny floor shows. How else do you explain the world being presented with Michael Aspel and a judging panel including Anita Harris, Patrick Mower, Shirley Bassey and John Conteh? This is the year the winner was Wales' Helen Morgan and was forced to stand down after four days for being an unwed mother. More importantly it was the year that Aspel, tired of the same routine on his thirteenth year with the gig, decided to throw in the odd socio-political question, so Miss South Africa is asked "do you think the great resources of your country will ever become exhausted?" and Morgan is pitted... well, we won't spoil it, but check 51:20, nearly topped by the one he lands on Miss USA at 53:24. He only did one more contest.

30 YEARS AGO TODAY: Derek Serpell-Morris was a Bristolian legend, a former accountant in his fifties who DJ'd reggae, ska and soul to the local second generation immigrant families in the local pub every week. After the edition of magazine show Picture This, DJ Derek's Sweet Memory Sounds, aired he became greatly in demand, playing DJ sets across the festival calendar and Europe, cameoing in a Dizzee Rascal video and releasing a handpicked compilation on Trojan Records. Sadly he went missing in July 2015 and despite a comprehensive search effort, with Don Letts and members of Massive Attack helping raise funds, his remains were found the following March.

20 YEARS AGO TODAY: Maya Sharma's psychotic reign of terror in revenge for Dev dumping her begins by blowing up the Corner Shop, continuing two days later as she attempts arson on Dev and Sunita - the pre-fire part where she threatens Sunita with a Ganesh statue was attacked by Hindu groups who rejected ITV's apology - and then when that fails attempts vehicular homicide only to be scuppered by if anything even worse driving from a lorry. The car doesn't move for ages, why does the lorry driver just carry on straight ahead without braking?

November 23rd

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: already wary and nervous of the one-on-one nature, Richard Burton wasn't in a good way and just out to detox clinic when he appeared on Parkinson so the logistics were worked out to record the programme in the morning, hence Michael's casual, magnificent racing green jumper and wing collars. Burton settles down and reciprocates Parky's admiration with honesty and candidness but also impressions and poetry.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: we join Children In Need proceedings in the midst of that greatest of things, a celebrity band. Sadly Patrick Moore and Deryck Guyler must have got lost en route but Roy Castle, Lennard Pearce - his final TV appearance as he died three weeks later - and sticksman Bernie Winters, who immediately and vocally pisses straight off, are there while David Jason makes up for it all by treating Nicholas Lyndhurst as a rag doll whilst Joanna Lumley, in a Zandra Rhodes-inspired wig, tries to kidnap Schnorbitz. Then Tessa Sanderson arrives to cuddle up to David (who really doesn't seem to like Wogan) and Nick, and then Terry evidently forgets Gareth Thomas' name. Sadly this cuts off just as Sue Cook delivers the tantalising promise "Paul Heiney is in Brussels" and picks up after it as the steady stream of people continues, as does the steady stream of Wogan pisstaking. If the modern CIN night had this amount of technical fumbling, clumsy dead air and ragged conversational cul-de-sacs, it'd be BBC FAIL every day from here to eternity. Back then we just expected it, as apparently did we expect cheap robots like that year's supposed mascot Denby who is live in Leeds. Unsurprisingly, Pudsey was adopted for 1985. Meanwhile Harry Gration has some special women with him. What role do they play? We'll just have to listen in.

- over on ITV, it's facile but probably true to speculate that Central's coarse fishing club comedy-drama, compared to Auf Weidersehen Pet and led by former Crossroader Edward Clayton, Eh Brian! It's A Whopper didn't get a second series because it's called Eh Brian! It's A Whopper.

November 24th

50 YEARS AGO TODAY: Stephen Merchant is born. In 1997 he appeared on the Aspel-fronted BBC2 revival of Blockbusters (not to be confused with the Sky One revival, the Challenge revival or the Comedy Central revival)

- How big a star was peak Noele Gordon? She was chosen to host the Royal Variety Performance. But as even Nolly is forced to admit, there were bigger stars. Josephine Baker for one, among her final public appearances.

40 YEARS AGO TODAY: children's entertainment has plenty to offer these days but one thing it suffers from is a lack of pretend hippies singing a Pink Floyd song to a rubber plant. No wonder Neil looks quite haggard when he arrives within Saturday Superstore, he was killed five months earlier.

- Leonard Rossiter's last TV role, shown posthumously, was as the lead in King John as the mammoth BBC Shakespeare project wound towards its end.

ALSO... IBA Engineering Announcements today in 1987 look towards the future in more ways than in its synthtastic theme (Current Affairs by Francis Monkman, fact fans), previewing satellite services, the potential for a fifth terrestrial channel, stereo broadcasts and Channel 4 finally going fully nationwide.

What's in your tap water? Can you earn £££s at home? Can you trust credit deals? How difficult is packaging to open, and can you really have Diddy David Hamilton commentating on people trying? Why does this show have a studio audience and why are they making a big selling point of it? The Bottom Line, here in its second of a very short run today in 1988, was Thames' shot at an approachable consumer affairs programme with the scattershot presenting team of Emma Freud, Janice Long, GMTV launch host Michael Wilson and Danny Baker, who would induct it into his Room 101, in full Daz mode. "Flavoured milk, nice one!"

Like what we do? Why not support us? https://ko-fi.com/whydontyoutube